Various types of musical apparatuses are conventionally known in the art for automatically playing arpeggios in response to simple manual playing operations by the player on the keyboard. An example of automatic arpeggio playing apparatus is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,051,771 (corresponding to unexamined Japanese patent publication No. H11-126074) in which as the player designates a chord on the keyboard, the apparatus generates the chord constituent notes in succession as a broken chord based on a pre-stored arpeggio pattern.
In the above-referenced publication, a particular part of the keyboard is allotted for the arpeggio playing (i.e. an arpeggio key range), and a chord played by depressing the keys in the arpeggio key range is produced with successive generation of the chord constituent notes in an arpeggio pattern which is selected from among a plurality of pre-stored arpeggio patterns. However, this arpeggio playing apparatus is not adapted for playing arpeggios (i.e. broken chords) in different patterns respectively in response to different chords played in different key ranges.
A conventional arpeggio playing apparatus may be provided with a plurality of arpeggio playing mechanisms (or units) so that different chords played in the different key ranges would produce broken chords with different arpeggio patterns, respectively. However, an arpeggio playing apparatus generally starts reading out an arpeggio pattern to start a broken chord performance in response to key depressions (new key-ons detected) in the arpeggio key range, and stops reading out the arpeggio pattern when the depressed keys have all been released, although there can be different operations depending on the operation modes. Under such a circumstance, if the reading out operations of arpeggio patterns start independently at the different key ranges, the arpeggio patterns for playing arpeggios may run without being synchronized (i.e. under staggered rhythm beatings) with each other. The phenomenon of staggered rhythm beatings can occur similarly in the case where an arpeggio performance is conducted while other automatic performances such as an automatic rhythm performance and an automatic melody performance are running.